Saturday, July 18, 2015

Thanks to you all!

It is with enormous gratitude that I write this post, which
we hope will be the last in our series about the great flood of 2015. I have
literally been moved to tears many times in the past couple of weeks seeing how
many people have made donations to our “wetting registry” on the MyRegistry.com
site. And we have not even ever even met most of our donors in person! I never
expected to see such an overwhelmingly positive response, so I have been both
stunned and delighted. Hyena camp is slowly coming together again, thanks to
all of you and the heroic efforts of my students and camp staff. It will be
quite a while yet before we get back to the same level of function we enjoyed
before the flood, but the truly miraculous thing from my point of view is that,
thanks to your generous contributions to our flood relief efforts, it is now clear
that we WILL be able to get back to that level before too much longer, and I
will NOT be forced to c lose the hyena project down for good.

The Talek River has returned to its normal shallow, sleepy
creek-like state, and one would never guess from looking at it now that it
could ever rage so ferociously, or wreak such extraordinary havoc, in only a
few hours as it did on the night of 13 June. The flood now seems like little
more than a terrifying nightmare. The dry season has finally arrived here, and
the plains are already turning brown and dusty.Small groups of wildebeest have started to arrive in the Talek area so
our hyenas are feasting on them every night. Our most interesting post-flood
discovery to date has been the indication from the unusual behavior of our
study animals that the enormous Talek clan may at last be ready to fission
permanently into two or three new daughter clans. Student bloggers will
undoubtedly keep you posted about that as the new social situation becomes
clearer. For the moment, suffice it to say that I am very deeply grateful to
all of our readers and friends of the hyena project who have made donations
that will allow us to keep the project going.

Help Support the Research

You can help support our research by making a donation to the Hyena Research Fund at MSU. Your contributions provide necessary resources for the students and scientists to continue our work. Use the link below to make a donation or contact MSU for additional details.